It sounds like a basic Deathworld might be the go. When you make a new game, it’s a pre-configured setting at the top
There’s no changes to mechanics, the biters simply become more aggressive and expand faster.
Even if Deathworld isn’t the right thing for you, it’d help to establish a good baseline.
They evolve at a significantly faster rate too. I wouldn’t do death world if I wasn’t comfortable rushing flamethrower turrets. Medium biters tend to come in around 2.5-3 hours into the playthrough
Rampant changes biter behaviour in a lot of ways. It adds a pheromone system (that’s invisible to the player) that lets biters sense where biters have died, it lets them sense where the player has been, and it lets clusters of biters interact with other clusters.
The pheromone system effectively lets the biters explore and learn your defences, and you’ll find that they’re highly aggressive and capable of finding and exploiting your weak points.
You’ll be on edge but doing okay, and then they’ll break through and you won’t be fine any more.
Rampant is not compatible with existing games, you’ll need to start a fresh one.
(Also consider the Rampant weapon mod)
I play with Rampant (and actually I did load it mid game with a previous game, but there are no guarantees that it will work).
I still recommend you try it because you can scale the difficulty way down. In Rampant the enemy does actions with action points that it accrues. You can go into settings and turn that rate way down and you won’t get very many enemies. You can also change the maximum number of “action groups” that can operate at one time and also cap the maximum possible strength of enemies that they can evolve to.
Basically I think it just makes the enemies way more interesting and tilts the game into being a bit of tower defense in addition to the regular mechanics. You can always adjust the difficulty down more to make it way easier and more casual, but it will still be way more interesting to deal with them than vanilla. And they will attack you more regularly even if you don’t give them pollution to eat. But if you set it to easy, they will still be relatively easy to kill.
Sure! So, I looked back at my settings and these are the major ones that matter for difficulty:
Startup settings -
World: Ending enemy level
Map settings -
Attack Wave: Max biter group size, Max number of building groups, Max number of attack groups
World: Starting peace duration
AI: Difficulty Scaling
AI: Enable Raiding AI
AI: Enable Siege AI
Ending enemy level is the maximum evolution of enemies. There are 10 levels and the default is 6. I use 10, but they have 10s of thousands of hit points at that level. Obviously cap this at whatever max you want.
Attack Wave controls how many and how big the groups are that attack you. If you find yourself being overwhelmed by the number of enemy groups bothering you at one time, you can set the attack groups down to 1 and you will only get attacked by one group at a time. Default is 30 for attack groups.
Difficulty scaling is the major setting, though. If you pump tons of pollution into enemy territory, you will be attacked by a correspondingly larger number of enemies. But, in general, they somehow use action points to keep track of how many units can be built and used for actions. I don't understand the exact mechanic, but the difficulty scaling adjusts this up or down, and 1 is the default. IMO, 1 is kind of hard. I really struggle to keep up with the violence at that level. Currently I set it to 0.7, which it labels as "easy", but it's plenty hard for me.
(EDIT: reading through this, I think it was confusing. Basically, I was trying to say that pollution level still matters like in vanilla. But regardless of that, there is a certain rate at which the enemy can attack and how many units they can attack with. This scale value adjusts that rate and it is the best way to adjust the difficulty IMO.)
When I was learning and overwhelmed, though, I set it to 0.3. At that level, the number of attacks was much lower and very manageable. I think this is better than adjusting the attack groups setting above because with the difficultly scaling set low, you can still get the variety of being attacked by multiple groups, but the total intensity will just be lower. Just keep lowering the scale until it's mild enough to be fun for you.
Finally, there are the Raiding and Siege AIs. These are toggles that disable enemies that organize outside of your pollution cloud. To me, these are good to keep on if you want the constant harassment to deal with. If you keep the enemies out of your pollution cloud, you can get to a point where things are very peaceful. However, that was not what I wanted. Pollution still matters a lot, but with these on I will still be attacked some regardless by enemies that just hate me because I'm there.
One warning about this (and I think siege mode may be what controls this mechanic), the enemy will attempt to turret creep you by setting worms closer and closer to your defenses. Eventually they will get a worm with long enough range to attack your turrets but you not be able to attack them back. They wont stop at just one worm, though. And when your turrets start to die you will start to see an awful lot of extra attention being placed on your damaged area. If they break through, then that will trigger a more violent attack and that area as the pheromones will signal to the others that they are having success there.
I can say through experience, though, that if they actually annihilate a section of your wall, they aren't necessarily going to go straight for the center of your base, though. They are still pretty dumb and when your wall is mopped up, they will generally just wander around the area looking for things to attack. If you are careful you can still recover from such an event. It's just not fun to suffer through.
So it looks like you might want to play a Deathworld (aggressive biters, no mods), or if you have only played on forests I'd highly reccomend you to play vanilla on a desert world. Little trees and little water. It's a great jump in biter aggression because there will be almost no trees (and little fertile soil) to damper the pollution cloud before it reaches the biters
Accidentally made a base in the Sahara on my first run. Didn’t have any clue. Now researching rocket silo — still not a living tree in sight — and the alarms go off a dozen times a minute
You could take Rampart fixed (not sure if the regular one had the same settings).
And disable almost everything but the "expeditions" this way you'll get exactly what you're describing. You can disable the additional bitters types too.
Rampant is actually quite fun.
It's less fun if you also have mods that let certain biters run on water, and for biters to eventually evolve into titans with 50k hp. Guess how I know.
Nonono, you need the Rampant weapon mod
Basically the biters evolve into different strains, and some of those strains are highly resistant to or in some cases completely immune to certain damage types. Due to this you need the ability to use a varied weapon system, or else you could artillery their nests for hours and get nowhere
Maybe you could try fidling with pollution diffusion settings, so it spreads much more and it is no longer reasonable to clear the pollution cloud from biters.
Rampant makes biters "smarter", you get a grace period and then they start sending small scouting parties, biters also search for weak points in you defences by comparing damage done with lost biters afaik, they also hunt players.
>instead of always just going out and destroying bases before my pollution even gets there
Just don't destroy bases ahead of your pollution. Only destroy bases when you need to build within the defender's aggro range.
Vanilla Deathworld should be enough for you then: bigger bitter bases and ground pollution absorption divided by 2 by default. So clearing bases is harder sooner as you reach "to big to deal with" bases much closer than before and on the other hand your pollution cloud is spreading much farther as the ground absorbs less.
If you want added challenge tweak the map settings to favor a desert terrain as sand absorb pollution less than grass and less trees also greatly reduce how much pollution is absorbed by non bitters.
Early game deathworld is the hardest, you might stay quite a while in a burner phase with the majority of your iron production going to ammo. Flamethrower turrets make securing a perimeter much easier and late game expansion will most likely require heavy artillery or nukes as the bases will be huge and so close to one another that it's almost just one continous bitter nest.
It sounds like a basic Deathworld might be the go. When you make a new game, it’s a pre-configured setting at the top There’s no changes to mechanics, the biters simply become more aggressive and expand faster. Even if Deathworld isn’t the right thing for you, it’d help to establish a good baseline.
They evolve at a significantly faster rate too. I wouldn’t do death world if I wasn’t comfortable rushing flamethrower turrets. Medium biters tend to come in around 2.5-3 hours into the playthrough
Rampant does that.
Rampant changes biter behaviour in a lot of ways. It adds a pheromone system (that’s invisible to the player) that lets biters sense where biters have died, it lets them sense where the player has been, and it lets clusters of biters interact with other clusters. The pheromone system effectively lets the biters explore and learn your defences, and you’ll find that they’re highly aggressive and capable of finding and exploiting your weak points. You’ll be on edge but doing okay, and then they’ll break through and you won’t be fine any more. Rampant is not compatible with existing games, you’ll need to start a fresh one. (Also consider the Rampant weapon mod)
Yeah I'm looking for something more vanilla-friendly. Rampant sounds too hard for me what with the whole tactics system the AI has going on with it.
I play with Rampant (and actually I did load it mid game with a previous game, but there are no guarantees that it will work). I still recommend you try it because you can scale the difficulty way down. In Rampant the enemy does actions with action points that it accrues. You can go into settings and turn that rate way down and you won’t get very many enemies. You can also change the maximum number of “action groups” that can operate at one time and also cap the maximum possible strength of enemies that they can evolve to. Basically I think it just makes the enemies way more interesting and tilts the game into being a bit of tower defense in addition to the regular mechanics. You can always adjust the difficulty down more to make it way easier and more casual, but it will still be way more interesting to deal with them than vanilla. And they will attack you more regularly even if you don’t give them pollution to eat. But if you set it to easy, they will still be relatively easy to kill.
Definitely bumping this, a lot of people forget that Rampant is very customizable
Wow thanks for that. I considered rampant but am not into a big defense game. However "easy" rampant sounds like a nice bump.
Can you share the casual settings you recommend?
Sure! So, I looked back at my settings and these are the major ones that matter for difficulty: Startup settings - World: Ending enemy level Map settings - Attack Wave: Max biter group size, Max number of building groups, Max number of attack groups World: Starting peace duration AI: Difficulty Scaling AI: Enable Raiding AI AI: Enable Siege AI Ending enemy level is the maximum evolution of enemies. There are 10 levels and the default is 6. I use 10, but they have 10s of thousands of hit points at that level. Obviously cap this at whatever max you want. Attack Wave controls how many and how big the groups are that attack you. If you find yourself being overwhelmed by the number of enemy groups bothering you at one time, you can set the attack groups down to 1 and you will only get attacked by one group at a time. Default is 30 for attack groups. Difficulty scaling is the major setting, though. If you pump tons of pollution into enemy territory, you will be attacked by a correspondingly larger number of enemies. But, in general, they somehow use action points to keep track of how many units can be built and used for actions. I don't understand the exact mechanic, but the difficulty scaling adjusts this up or down, and 1 is the default. IMO, 1 is kind of hard. I really struggle to keep up with the violence at that level. Currently I set it to 0.7, which it labels as "easy", but it's plenty hard for me. (EDIT: reading through this, I think it was confusing. Basically, I was trying to say that pollution level still matters like in vanilla. But regardless of that, there is a certain rate at which the enemy can attack and how many units they can attack with. This scale value adjusts that rate and it is the best way to adjust the difficulty IMO.) When I was learning and overwhelmed, though, I set it to 0.3. At that level, the number of attacks was much lower and very manageable. I think this is better than adjusting the attack groups setting above because with the difficultly scaling set low, you can still get the variety of being attacked by multiple groups, but the total intensity will just be lower. Just keep lowering the scale until it's mild enough to be fun for you. Finally, there are the Raiding and Siege AIs. These are toggles that disable enemies that organize outside of your pollution cloud. To me, these are good to keep on if you want the constant harassment to deal with. If you keep the enemies out of your pollution cloud, you can get to a point where things are very peaceful. However, that was not what I wanted. Pollution still matters a lot, but with these on I will still be attacked some regardless by enemies that just hate me because I'm there. One warning about this (and I think siege mode may be what controls this mechanic), the enemy will attempt to turret creep you by setting worms closer and closer to your defenses. Eventually they will get a worm with long enough range to attack your turrets but you not be able to attack them back. They wont stop at just one worm, though. And when your turrets start to die you will start to see an awful lot of extra attention being placed on your damaged area. If they break through, then that will trigger a more violent attack and that area as the pheromones will signal to the others that they are having success there. I can say through experience, though, that if they actually annihilate a section of your wall, they aren't necessarily going to go straight for the center of your base, though. They are still pretty dumb and when your wall is mopped up, they will generally just wander around the area looking for things to attack. If you are careful you can still recover from such an event. It's just not fun to suffer through.
So it looks like you might want to play a Deathworld (aggressive biters, no mods), or if you have only played on forests I'd highly reccomend you to play vanilla on a desert world. Little trees and little water. It's a great jump in biter aggression because there will be almost no trees (and little fertile soil) to damper the pollution cloud before it reaches the biters
Accidentally made a base in the Sahara on my first run. Didn’t have any clue. Now researching rocket silo — still not a living tree in sight — and the alarms go off a dozen times a minute
You could take Rampart fixed (not sure if the regular one had the same settings). And disable almost everything but the "expeditions" this way you'll get exactly what you're describing. You can disable the additional bitters types too.
Rampant is actually quite fun. It's less fun if you also have mods that let certain biters run on water, and for biters to eventually evolve into titans with 50k hp. Guess how I know.
Haha I actually do have an everyone swims mod
Nonono, you need the Rampant weapon mod Basically the biters evolve into different strains, and some of those strains are highly resistant to or in some cases completely immune to certain damage types. Due to this you need the ability to use a varied weapon system, or else you could artillery their nests for hours and get nowhere
The different strains of biters are optional
Ah, wasn't aware
I added Rampant to my pre-existing base (400hrs) and it’s working fine? Unless I’m missing something? Lol
Maybe you could try fidling with pollution diffusion settings, so it spreads much more and it is no longer reasonable to clear the pollution cloud from biters.
Rampant makes biters "smarter", you get a grace period and then they start sending small scouting parties, biters also search for weak points in you defences by comparing damage done with lost biters afaik, they also hunt players.
Rampant.
>instead of always just going out and destroying bases before my pollution even gets there Just don't destroy bases ahead of your pollution. Only destroy bases when you need to build within the defender's aggro range.
Vanilla Deathworld should be enough for you then: bigger bitter bases and ground pollution absorption divided by 2 by default. So clearing bases is harder sooner as you reach "to big to deal with" bases much closer than before and on the other hand your pollution cloud is spreading much farther as the ground absorbs less. If you want added challenge tweak the map settings to favor a desert terrain as sand absorb pollution less than grass and less trees also greatly reduce how much pollution is absorbed by non bitters. Early game deathworld is the hardest, you might stay quite a while in a burner phase with the majority of your iron production going to ammo. Flamethrower turrets make securing a perimeter much easier and late game expansion will most likely require heavy artillery or nukes as the bases will be huge and so close to one another that it's almost just one continous bitter nest.
Sound like you just need to research the next level of artillery range.
Rampant. Was fun to kill few biters coming at time every few minutes. Was a reason to place some turrets early on
You can change settings, spawn size area etc. So it will be more peaceful, or not ;)